


The Evidence of Things Not Seen

by sylviarachel



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, John uses bad language, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 17:03:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/968383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sylviarachel/pseuds/sylviarachel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anger is one of the stages of grief. It may take some time for John to stop grieving.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Evidence of Things Not Seen

“John.” Bass-baritone rumble, once so familiar, now so impossible. “All right?”

_I’m not hearing this. Shouldn’t have had that last drink. It’s the fucking sleeping pills, I knew they were a bad idea._

“You’re not hallucinating. Turn round.”

John has good instincts, which is why he’s still alive, sort of. They’re failing him now: telling him to run, to fight, to smash something, so many cerebellar impulses that he ends up frozen in place. This is not good. This is how people end up getting shot.

“John?”

“No.” His teeth are clenched tight, his voice comes out strangled and strange.

_It’s a trick. It’s the pills. I’m not falling for it._

_Shit._

There are measured footsteps.

“You’re angry.” It sounds so much like him – he observes, he makes the correct deduction, he _utterly fails to get it._

“It’s one of the stages.” Without meaning to, at all, John’s given in, he’s talking back to the hallucinatory voice. He can’t help it, somehow. Is this where he breaks down and says all the things his therapist kept telling him he should say to her? Yes, apparently: “You wouldn’t know, I suppose.”

As soon as the words are out, bitter, unnecessary, he feels guilty about saying them, but what does it matter? He’s talking to an auditory hallucination, after all. He’s talking to a projection of his own fucked-up subconscious. Against his better judgement, that thought carries him around on one heel as he starts to say, _And after what you did to me, to all of us, what the fuck else did you expect?_

But he only gets as far as “And after–” before his (intermittently, psychosomatically) bad leg buckles under him and he slides down against the wall, gulping air and breathing curses.

_Ghosts. I’m seeing fucking ghosts now._

If so, it’s remarkably solid, this ghost that springs towards him in the semi-darkness and crouches at his elbow, long legs folded grasshopper-like, hand on his shoulder, peering into his face.

John shuts his eyes and turns his head away, but he can still feel the hand, still hear the soft breathing.

“You think you’re hallucinating.”

“You’re dead, Sherlock. So if I’m seeing you, I must be hallucinating.”

“I’m not dead. Obviously.”

“I saw you jump off a fucking roof. I saw the blood. I tried to take your pulse and there wasn’t one. Jesus.” The fall, the crash, the blood, the brokenness. The _eyes_ , God, the cold dead eyes. John buries his face in his hands, tries to calm his breathing. It works about as well as usual, which is to say, not very.

“It was important for you to believe in my death.”

_Wait, what?_

“You needed to be absolutely convincing, so you had to be convinced. Otherwise we would both have ended up dead. Actually dead. But ...”

The pause goes on so long that John can’t help himself: he opens his eyes and raises his head.

Still there.

“I ... miscalculated. I failed to realize how long I would need to stay dead.”

No matter how much John blinks and shakes his head and smacks the heel of his hand against his temple: Still there. Speaking in Sherlock’s voice, watching him with Sherlock’s eyes, wearing Sherlock’s stupid melodramatic thousand-quid coat, gripping his shoulder with Sherlock’s long, sensitive fingers. Either someone from the Baskerville installation has been fumigating John’s flat recently, or ...

He puts out a tentative hand, connects with bespoke broadcloth over a bony knee. Strange how close they grew, the two of them, while so seldom actually touching.

“You died,” says John. “I saw you die.”

“Strictly speaking,” says the ghost, “you saw me fall.”

It’s this, finally, the slightly pedantic tone in which the correction is issued, that finally tips the balance of, well, improbability.

“It’s you,” John says. “It’s actually you.”

And then he’s seeing through a hot red haze.

He jerks away from Sherlock’s hand on his shoulder, scrambles to his feet. “You bastard,” he says. “You goddamned fucking horrible bastard. What the _fucking HELL_ , Sherlock?”

By the end of that sentence he’s shouting, almost screaming, his throat raw with eighteen months’ suppressed grief and rage.

“John–” Sherlock’s on his feet now, too, which is fine because it puts him right in the path of John’s furious uppercut. He goes down like ninepins, an ungainly sprawling of limbs on the bland carpet of John’s bland bedsit. He’s lost weight, he’s let his hair get too long. He doesn’t look good.

_He’s suffered, too, so that makes it all right? Sod that._

He staggers back up but doesn’t, to John’s surprise, hit back. “You really are angry.” He turns half away, careful of the small window. “I suppose–”

Whatever he supposes is lost in a flying rugby tackle. John’s gone beyond angry, out the other side of furious into some No Man’s Land of ungovernable rage.

“I would have helped you,” he snarls, hanging on for dear life. “I would have done whatever it took, do you understand? You could have _told_ me, you fucking insufferable sod!”

“John – I know – but – you’re a terrible liar, John.” Breathless huffs through the vice-grip of John’s elbow. “Other people – have got tells – you’ve got – a troupe of Morris dancers – and – a brass band.”

“Are you fucking _serious?_ You did that to me, you made me _watch you die_ because you think I’m _not a good enough ACTOR_?”

Sherlock staggers backwards, fighting his grip, and John’s back slams against the wall.

At this point, and John’s honestly surprised that it took so long, because there’s been a lot of shouting and thumping and it’s half eleven at night -- there’s a double thump from the other side of the wall and a muffled voice calls, “Oi! Keep it down!”

“It was _necessary!”_ Sherlock gasps. His fingertips bite into John’s arm.

“It was cruel, Sherlock,” John says, in a whispered hiss no less full of rage than the shouting. “It was a bloody horrible thing to do.”

He’s running out of swear words, and of emotional energy, but he seems to have a bottomless well of being angry at Sherlock. _I missed you so much, you bastard. You fucked off and left me to deal with the aftermath. I wanted to die. That is NOT OKAY, Sherlock. There is no definition of “okay” that in any way fits this situation._

“It was necessary,” Sherlock repeats, also quietly, though that could be because John’s still constricting his airway. “I realize it was in some ways unfair to you. I hoped you would ... understand ... my reasons.”

“I might have,” John concedes, “if you’d been arsed to tell me what they were.”

He loosens his grip, just slightly, but it’s a mistake that Sherlock ruthlessly exploits: before he knows what’s happened, John’s flat on his back on the oatmeal-coloured carpet with Sherlock’s wiry forearm across his throat.

“He had snipers,” Sherlock hisses. His eyes are manic, the pupils dilated, the white showing all the way around the thin band of pale iris. “One for you. One for Lestrade. One for Mrs Hudson. He gave me a choice. Either they saw me jump, or all of you died. Then he shot himself so that I’d have no way of forcing him to call them off. Put yourself in my place, John. Tell me honestly, what would you have done?”

John doesn’t need to say anything, even if he could; they both know the answer to that question. He blinks instead, because his vision is blurring.

“I regret the necessity of deceiving you,” says Sherlock, his voice calmer now, more like himself. “Very much.”

Sherlock apologizing is, as ever, a rare and gratifying thing to witness. But it’s not enough, not for this. Not for a year and a half of struggling to put himself back together, of shuffling wearily from the surgery to his bedsit and never going anywhere else because everywhere else is, or could have been, somewhere he went with Sherlock and he can’t be answerable for the consequences, a year and a half of feeling more alone, more lost, than ever before in his life, because he was lost and alone before Sherlock but he didn’t know, then, how it felt not to be. Not for the unforgivable things John’s said to people who care about him when they dared to suggest he needed to let go. Not for the sodding great wound, still unhealed, gone septic, where their friendship used to be. _Physician, heal thyself? Yeah, chance’d be a fine thing._

John struggles to get the words out, flails briefly, gets his elbows under him and shoves his assailant away. Scrabbles backwards to sit up with his back against the wall, where he can get his breath back.

“Not,” he huffs, “as much as you’re going to.”

* * *

“Who else knows?” John asks him.

They’ve reached a truce of sorts: circling warily around each other, making sure not to get too close. Holding instant cold packs from John’s first-aid kit over their bruises, and stiff upper lips over their … deeper wounds. John sits on his bed, propped against the wall, feet dangling awkwardly; Sherlock perches (like some kind of really high-end wading bird, thinks John, irritated) on the arm of John’s (the landlord’s) characterless, uncomfortable armchair, one half of his face gently lit by the glow of streetlamps. They’re sitting in the dark, because when John reached for the light switch Sherlock sprang at him and knocked his hand away.

“Well, Mycroft, obviously.”

_Obviously. Secretive bastard. He could have said something, I know he’s been watching me._

“And …” The uncharacteristic hesitation tells John he’s not going to like the next thing he hears. “And Molly Hooper.”

“Molly?” This is almost enough to set John off again. He’s seething, furious with Molly for not telling him (Or did she try? Was that what she meant, when she said “He wouldn’t want you to be so unhappy”?), with Sherlock for putting her in such a spot, with Mycroft for, presumably, pulling the strings that made it possible for them to carry the whole thing off. “What did– No, never mind, I don’t want to know.”

“Don’t you?” Sherlock’s obvious bafflement is almost endearing. Almost.

There’s a silence. Sherlock looks out of the window into the night, inscrutable; John broods.

“I missed you,” Sherlock says suddenly, very softly. “I miscalculated that, too. How … unpleasant it would be. To be on my own.”

“Very unpleasant,” John agrees. Touched, despite himself. “Horrible.”

“Yes.”

They sit in silence some more, carefully looking in opposite directions.

“I’m still angry, Sherlock. I’m still really, _really_ angry.”

“You asked me for a miracle,” Sherlock says, still very quietly. “In the churchyard. You said, ‘One more miracle, please, Sherlock, for me. Don’t … be … dead.’”

John can hear his own tamped-down, papered-over agony in Sherlock’s voice, his perfect mimicry, and he’s not sure whether he most wants to weep or throw things.

“You cried,” Sherlock continues. “You thought I was dead, and you mourned me. I knew you were … distressed. I didn’t realize you would be so angry when you discovered I wasn’t. Dead, I mean.”

“You came to your own funeral.” John shakes his head. “What am I saying? Of course you did.”

And then, because this is, after all, Sherlock he’s talking to, he clarifies: “I’m not angry with you for not being dead, you prat. I’m not angry because you saved my life. I’m angry, Sherlock, because instead of trusting me, you lied to me. And because you sent me away instead of asking me to help.”

“… Oh.”

Sherlock’s not sulking, John eventually realizes: he’s subdued.

“So,” says John, when the silence is becoming uncomfortable, “does your brother know you’re here?”

This has the desired effect: Sherlock sits up straighter, narrows his eyes, sneers: “Undoubtedly he has worked it out by now.”

 _So, not a Mycroft-approved visit, then. Right._ “Is he going to send a Black Ops team to take you away, d’you think? Because if so–”

“Why are you living in this horrible bedsit?” Sherlock asks, interrupting.

 _Doesn’t want to talk about Mycroft: check._ “It’s not horrible,” says John, mildly. Fairly mildly. “Boring, though, I’ll give you that.”

“I went to Baker Street, yesterday,” Sherlock says, as if John hasn’t spoken, “and you weren’t there. Mrs Hudson nearly spotted me. It took me until this morning to find you. Why did you leave?”

John just stares at him, the banked anger starting to smoulder again but a familiar incredulous laughter bubbling up, too. “Do you just delete feelings, because they’re messy and confusing?” He asks. “Is that it? Or because they hurt, and they give other people leverage to hurt you?”

Sherlock looks away. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I don’t believe you’re really a sociopath, Sherlock, but I think you’ve tried so hard for so long to be one that it might be starting to work. You can’t honestly not know the answer to that question.”

Long pause. Then, finally, “We lived there together. It reminded you. You … didn’t like that.”

John, in spite of everything, in spite of the epic understatement Sherlock’s just produced, smiles at him. “There, you see?”

Sherlock frowns: “What?”

“Feelings,” John elaborates. “Still not really your area, but that wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

This elicits an irritated huff.

“Just promise me something, Sherlock. The next time someone threatens my life, _tell_ me. Yeah?”

Silence. Then, “If I promise, will you stop being angry?”

John gives this probably more thought than it deserves. “No,” he says finally.

Sherlock curls in on himself, just marginally. “Oh,” he says.

“I won’t lie to you,” John continues. “I expect I’ll be angry for a while. But—” He struggles for the right way to say this. “I haven’t stopped being your friend, Sherlock, just because I’m angry. I just …”

“I didn’t like the flat, either,” Sherlock says. Interrupting, again. “Without you in it. It felt wrong.”

“Yes,” says John, flatly. “Very wrong.”

“You’ll come and live in it again with me? When you’ve finished being angry?”

John, surprised: “D’you think Mrs Hudson would have us back, after … everything?”

Sherlock, more surprised: “Why not?”

* * *

“You should have known,” Sherlock says, sounding cross. He’s pacing, in the dark. John wonders how long he’s gone without eating, without sleeping; wonders what the hell else he’s been doing to himself; wonders how many nicotine patches are concealed beneath his sleeves. Is too angry to ask. “You should have worked it out, that I’d be back eventually.”

“Sherlock, that’s absurd.” With effort, John keeps his voice level. “Completely and utterly absurd. Also, you told me not half an hour ago how important it was for me to really believe you were dead. You can’t have it both ways.”

“I thought.” Pace. Swooping turn. Pace. “I thought it would be quicker.”

“What would?” John’s still angry, of course he is, but he has to admit he’s curious, too.

“Mopping up,” Sherlock says. “Obviously.” And, when John doesn’t immediately go, _Oh, of course, I see_ : “Moriarty.”

John squeezes the bridge of his nose. “You’ve just told me he shot himself on the roof of Bart’s,” he points out.

“Ye-es,” Sherlock says, in that tone that conveys more clearly than words that John is an idiot, “but he had people. A large number of them, as it turned out.”

John considers this. “And you’ve been ... what? Chasing them round the globe in a variety of disguises?”

“So that Mycroft can have them secretly arrested, yes. Obviously.”

“Jesus, Sherlock, I was _joking.”_

Sherlock gives him a look. “How disappointing. I thought you were _following._ Finally.”

“Fuck off,” says John. And then, “No, all right, don’t really. You’ve just got back.”

* * *

John goes out for takeaway from the all-night Lebanese place -– Tariq behind the counter asks what’s happened to his cane, which is when John realizes the limp’s completely gone again, isn’t that interesting -- and when he gets back he finds Sherlock draped awkwardly across the horrible armchair, sound asleep. He considers waking him and making him eat, but decides sleep is probably equally needed, and doesn’t. He eats his own share of the kebab and rice, and stows the leftovers in his tiny fridge to be bullied into Sherlock later.

Then he sits on the edge of his bed and wonders what the hell he’s going to do now.

Sherlock wakes up, half an hour later, in a flurry of limbs and hoarse shouting.

“Nightmares?” John asks, laconic.

Sherlock grimaces and doesn’t answer.

John doesn’t ask if he’s hungry (nothing could be more pointless) but gets the cold kebab and rice out of the fridge and heats them up in the microwave. “Eat,” he says, handing Sherlock a plate and a fork.

“I’m not—”

“I _don’t care_ ,” John growls, taking advantage of Sherlock’s seated (sprawled) position to loom over him for a change. “Eat the fucking kebab, Sherlock. Doctor’s orders.”

And Sherlock, remarkably, does. Although he glowers balefully at John throughout the entire performance, John still counts this as a win.

“What,” he says, when the kebab and rice have vanished and he’s cleared up the takeaway debris, “are you doing here?”

“In London? Obviously I’m--”

 _“Here,_ Sherlock. In my flat.”

Sherlock looks at him. “Talking to you,” he says. Again the _you-are-a-hopeless-idiot_ voice, which is incredibly obnoxious and at the same time weirdly comforting. “Eating a kebab, under duress, even though I am _not hungry_. Obviously.”

“I mean,” John clarifies, patiently, “what’s the plan, exactly? You wanted me to know you’re back, but not Mrs Hudson. We’re sitting here in the dark because you wouldn’t let me put on a light, and you’ve been very careful to stay away from the window. So whatever you’re up to is clearly not finished yet.”

“An excellent deduction, John,” says Sherlock, in a not entirely flattering tone of pleased surprise.

Entirely not flattering, actually.

“I’m not actually a _complete_ idiot, you know.”

“I never thought you were.”

“Really.” John doesn’t bother trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “That’s news to me.”

Sherlock frowns at him. “I really expected you’d be more pleased to see me,” he says, sounding put out and, underneath it, a little hurt.

_Not doing so well with the sociopathy, are we._

John sits on the edge of the bed again, props his elbows on his knees. Takes a deep breath; lets it out. “Sherlock,” he says, and waits for Sherlock to focus on him. “I am incredibly pleased to see you. I’m actually _wildly elated_ that you’re alive.”

“But—”

“I am also,” John continues, overriding the interruption, “simultaneously, very, very angry with you, for the reasons I’ve explained.”

“That makes no sense.”

John runs an exasperated hand through his hair, thinks irrelevantly that it’s past time to have it trimmed, and tries to explain. “When you were a kid,” he says, “and you did something really dangerous, did your mum never hug you half to death and threaten to beat you, all in the same breath?”

But instead of looking enlightened, Sherlock just looks more baffled. “No,” he says.

“You never did anything dangerous when you were a kid?” John asks, surprised. “I’d have thought—”

“Of course I did dangerous things,” Sherlock says, impatient. “I blew up most of the nursery, once, for instance. Testing out the properties of magnesium. My parents gave the nanny three thousand quid to not tell the next nanny about it. What does that have to do with this?”

“It – I – Christ, Sherlock.” John scrubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Look, just – try to imagine how you’d feel if I’d done this to you, all right? Indulge me.”

And Sherlock, for a wonder, actually does. John can see him working the steps out in his head, can see it in the just perceptible tightening of his jaw even before Sherlock’s fist crashes against the arm of the chair and his eyes go bleak and terrible.

“There’s one man left,” Sherlock finally says, a low, tense mutter in the direction of the carpet. “One of Moriarty’s lot. Lieutenant-Colonel Sebastian Moran, formerly of the—”

“The Royal Hussars, yeah.” John sits up straight in unexpected recognition. “I remember him, he was cashiered after that friendly-fire accident that turned out to be … not accidental.”

Sherlock is startled into looking up at him. “You know each other?”

“No. Well, I knew _of_ him, everyone did. I don’t expect he ever heard of me. Well above my pay grade.”

“Well.” Sherlock steeples his long fingers, and his dark brows fold into a ferocious glower. “He’s the last of them, anyway, and he’s here in London. Once I’ve got him, this will all be over, and I can stop being dead.”

“Once _we’ve_ got him, you mean,” says John, firmly.

The look Sherlock gives him is trying to be inscrutable but is actually a nakedly readable mix of hope, terror and crashing guilt. “I am not involving you in this operation, John. It’s too dangerous.”

John laughs out loud at this. He can’t help it. “You’re not serious,” he says.

“John.” There’s no laughter in Sherlock’s voice, no sarcasm, nothing but stark, desperate intent. “The only thing that has allowed me to do what I’ve been doing for the past eighteen months is the fact that I was taking all the risks myself. That my actions did not endanger … anyone I care about. That you were safe.” He swallows hard. “That was the _whole point_ of dying, to keep you safe.”

John blinks.

“And yet,” he says slowly, “here you are.”

“Well.” Sherlock looks at the carpet again. “I was in London. I wanted … I wanted to make sure you were … all right.”

_All right. God. The one thing I am absolutely not, Sherlock, is all right._

Except that, the more he sits here talking to a dead man about impossible things, the less he feels like the walking dead. _There is something very wrong with this picture. But I think … I think it’s the picture I belong in._

“And who,” says John, “has been making sure _you_ were all right?”

“I don’t need—”

“Yes, you do, you insufferable prat.” John shakes his head. “Tell me what you’re planning.”

Sherlock gives him a long, steady glare, but John has never been afraid of Sherlock.

“If I tell you,” says Sherlock, through clenched teeth, “you’ll insist on coming along, and if something happened to you—”

“You do realize,” John says, “I could have been hit by a bus or, or died of boredom at any point in the past eighteen months. Anything can happen. It’s not always your fault.”

“John—”

“ _And also_ , if you don’t tell me, I’m going to follow you anyway, and then I’ll be a liability instead of an asset because I won’t know what you’re planning.”

“You wouldn’t.”

John folds his arms and glares. “Try me.”

He watches with interest as Sherlock struggles to arrive at an effective response. “You,” he finally says, glaring, “are _completely impossible_.”

“Yes. Fine.” John says cheerfully. The anger’s still there, but the flame is sputtering. _Sherlock’s alive after all, and so am I, after all. It’s all going to be fine._ “So: what’s the plan?”


End file.
